Something About Sex

Something About Sex

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Adam Rifkin may not have the most remarkable track record as a writer, director, or actor, but it would be difficult to think of another Hollywood hack whose career has had as many eccentric twists and turns. Starting out as a bad-movie wunderkind, Rifkin worked on several sleazy B-movies under the name Rif Coogan, including such late-night-cable classics as The Invisible Maniac and Psycho Cop Returns. Under his own name, Rifkin also wrote and/or directed a series of low-budget would-be cult films, including such better-off-forgotten fare as The Nutt House, The Chase, and The Dark Backward. Rifkin's career took a turn toward the mainstream, however, when he wrote the sleeper hit Mouse Hunt, leading to gigs directing a pair of hotly anticipated studio films, the Kiss nostalgia vehicle Detroit Rock City and the high-school horror-comedy Munchies. Something About Sex, once known under the far-less-video-shelf-friendly title Denial, is therefore something of an anomaly in Rifkin's career, a twentysomething ensemble comedy-drama that dares to take on the taboo topic of living and loving in the '90s. Functioning as a sort of sitcom version of Your Friends And Neighbors, with some South Park-style vulgarity thrown in for good measure, Something About Sex chronicles a trio of seemingly happy couples whose relationships take some dark turns following a dinner party during which an enigmatic author (Jason Alexander, in a very mild variation on Jason Patric's character in Your Friends And Neighbors) doubts the feasibility of monogamous relationships. Competently, if unremarkably, acted by a cast that includes late-'80s teen-film staples Jonathan Silverman and Patrick Dempsey, Something About Sex is a watchable but unsurprising and unfunny film that has nothing to say about modern relationships other than the sort of men-are-dogs-who-can't-be-trusted shtick you'd expect to hear from a third-rate stand-up comic.